Office Update

My office is the best. We all spend time planning, re-planning, re-re-planning and hardly do any work. Right now, I’m in the happy situation of waiting for somebody to send me work, and somebody – who was supposed to have sent me work last week – has informed me that they cannot send it till next week. Happy days are here again! And, in case you’re thinking that, ha! well, she’ll have double the work next week, let me tell you, here things don’t work like that. I will simply reschedule next week’s work to the following week. Or maybe a week or two after that.

And as if that weren’t fun enough for you, there’s the added dimension of working with a team partially located in US (and other parts distributed around the globe). Typically, it goes something like this. The India tech team has a question, so someone writes an email to the US folk and then everyone packs up and goes home. The next day, there’s no reply. So everyone plays computer games and surfs the net. The following day, there’s a reply which is both incomplete and ambiguous, so someone bounces it back to the US and everyone goes home happy that progress has been made. Then comes the weekend. This is a double whammy. When it’s Friday for them, it’s Saturday for us, and no one checks mail. When we do check on Monday, it’s Sunday for them, so we don’t bother to reply.

Finally, by a stroke of bad luck (but how long can you postpone the inevitable?), the issue gets resolved. Of course, no one has bothered to keep the implementer in the loop, so it takes another few days before the resolution gets implemented and several days more before it gets into the documentation (and sometimes it never does).

The fun really begins when there are two teams working on related projects. Like someone’s working on an SDK and someone else is working on an application that runs on that SDK. So obviously, the SDK folks need to keep the application team up-to-date about what’s happening. Recently, I found that the app developers had got some information through a complicated network that had completely bypassed the SDK guys! Huh?